Monday, June 13, 2016

Now some, not Eli to be sure, want to know why Eli thinks astrobiology is a crok. Ever helpful, allow the Bunny to explain. There are many reasons but it starts with Enrico Fermi.

Lots of things do. Fermi was the type of thinker Eli has always aspires to and hopefully on occasion is. As Philip Morrison wrote, a Fermi question allows

... the estimation of rough but quantitative answers to unexpected questions about many aspects of the natural world. The method was the common and frequently amusing practice of Enrico Fermi, perhaps the most widely creative physicist of our times. Fermi delighted to think up and at once to discuss and to answer questions which drew upon deep understanding of the world, upon everyday experience, and upon the ability to make rough approximations, inspired guesses, and statistical estimates from very little data." [Philip Morrison [1]]

The story goes that one day Fermi was munching at lunch with colleagues when the question of extraterrestrial civilizations came up. They went through the exercise of thinking about how much time and resources it would take to spread through the galaxy and

Fermi realized that any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could rapidly colonize the entire Galaxy. Within ten million years, every star system could be brought under the wing of empire. Ten million years may sound long, but in fact it's quite short compared with the age of the Galaxy, which is roughly ten thousand million years. Colonization of the Milky Way should be a quick exercise.

So what Fermi immediately realized was that the aliens have had more than enough time to pepper the Galaxy with their presence. But looking around, he didn't see any clear indication that they're out and about. This prompted Fermi to ask what was (to him) an obvious question: "where is everybody?"

Now this is not quite astrobiology which in its weak form merely asks if there is any biology out there, but at this point it would be well to look at Brian's most recent post, where he discusses the morality of research on better ways of extracting fossil fuels. There is, sad to say, a strain of people who want to escape to space, terraform Mars, visit the stars, so that we can escape responsibility for dealing with the problems we are creating for ourselves on Earth. Even sadder and more common is the fixation of many more on an afterlife, the belief in which is coupled to escaping not only the responsibilities for this Earth but also the trials and tribulations of the same. Decoupling of this sort is not a good thing. Before flaming, allow Eli to point out that this is not an attack on the religious or the space mad, but rather on those who use either to ignore responsibility.

The last part is from personal experience. The NASA Astrobiology Program was started as a consequence of a claimed finding of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH in the business) in a meteorite that was expelled from Mars, landed in the Antarctic and was discovered.

This was amazing. To Eli what was amazing was the study that showed the rock came from Mars. He was rather more skeptical of the analytical chemistry and the possibility that the rocks had been contaminated over many thousands of years on Earth, but that is not the story. What the story really is, is how the news was received at NASA.

NASA is chronically underfunded and survives only because of public support driven in large part by the public's interest in space. To the NASA administration the Public Affairs Office is the key part of the agency. Evidence of "life" (OK of PAHs, but they didn't sell it that way) was immediately seen as a great way to sell both space science and the manned space program, two of the main parts of the Agency.

At the time Eli was running a summer program at Goddard working with the University Affairs Office there. The Director of the Office, Gerry Soffen was an amazing guy (you can read about him here and here). He also was one of the most important people in the agency who was a biologist, having been the Project Scientist for the Viking landers on Mars which search for life there and did not find it. True believers still believe Gerry lied.

In any case Gerry was tasked by Headquarters with putting together a much larger program than the small one that existed called exobiology. The idea was to not anchor the program in a single location but rather creating a distributed institute which had obvious political advantages and off they went.

The meteorite discovery was an important impetus for Mars exploration missions, even though doubt has been cast on how pristine the rock was and how the issue was handled since then. When Gerry asked Eli what he thought, the Rabett replied that although that he was amazed by the rock solid evidence that the meteorite came from Mars, he was less impressed by the chemistry knowing something about the technique used and the focus of research in the lab where the chemical characterization was done. In short they were not geochemists.

The doubts about the meteorite results arose very quickly, within two years, but by that point NASA had already decided to emphasize astrobiology. And many things became astrobiology which are really astrochemistry and astronomy.

71 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I think you've written what I expected you to write. This is certainly true

And many things became astrobiology which are really astrochemistry and astronomy.

Many things were linked to astrobiology that were really still astrophysics or - as you say - astrochemistry and that real links between astrophysics/astrochemistry/astrobiology were rather tenuous and it was people just trying to take advantage of an opportunity.

I would argue, however, that this is changing. We really are detecting rocky planets around other stars. Some of these even fall within what might be a habitable zone. In many/most cases, these are stars cooler than the Sun, the planet's radius is such that it probably isn't rocky, and - even if it was - it's probably tidally-locked (like the Moon is to the Earth). So, many/most/all of these planets probably aren't habitable.

However, it won't be very long before we start finding genuine Earth analogues (rocky planets at about 1AU around a star like the Sun). Actually determining if these planets could be habitable is maybe still quite some way away (more than 10 years) but 30-metre class telescopes and next generation space telescopes may make it possible to actually start trying to determine if such planets could harbour life.

So, I think astrobiology is becoming something geniunely interesting and that there are real links now between astrochemistry, astrophysics and astrobiology, but then maybe I would say that :-)

Allow me to comment on a subject about which I know next to nothing. Fermi's question: "where is everybody?" would appear to be a question of basic biology. If one assumes that humans are not the product of some alien intervention, then we are the result of some sequence of events over time which are called "evolution". Humans appear to be the winners of this fundamental process, which involves our procreation rates and the resulting increasing power of our brains which have resulted. Our intelligence must have evolved because it provided a set of procreation advantages over other species (and over less intelligent segments of earlier hominids). Human history before the scientific revolutions which made it much easier for humans to survive, involved ceaseless violent conflict as well as extreme changes in climate such as the Ice Ages, thus intelligence was necessary for survival against other larger, stronger, or faster species. We are the result of such violent conflicts and our genetic material would seem to include tendencies for extreme violence against both nature and ourselves. Yet, if "social Darwinism", as in survival of the most physically fit, were the governing rule, gorillas would have been the winners.

Because of a basic predisposition for violence, there is the possibility that humanity headed for self destruction as the result of our reproductive success. We are rapidly destroying the structure of the natural world upon which we (unknowingly) depend and we can not survive on a barren rocky planet without "technology". But all technologies require energy flows, and our sources of fossil energy are going to become unavailable in the relatively near future. It's just another manifestation of basic biological fact, that is, population dynamics and predator/prey relationships, which point to overpopulation leading to population crash. Whether such a collapse of civilization is inevitable can't be known until after the fossil fueled world is gone and the survivors can look back at the results.

My point is another question: "Is the appearance of intelligence part of a biological process which must inevitably end in collapse?". Or, as Craig Dilworth claimed, "Are we too smart for our own good?". If so, what are the chances that any other intelligent civilization(s) resulting from similar constraints would survive in the galaxy so that we might find them today? For us, 10 million years is about 5 times longer than the first appearance in the paleontological record of what we know as “humans”.

Fermi realized that any civilization with ... an immodest amount of imperial incentive could rapidly colonize the entire Galaxy. Within ten million years....This prompted Fermi to ask what was (to him) an obvious question: "where is everybody?"

Given a ten million year old empire, one might ask "what dynasty is this ?"

Actually, croks do have the right stuff, a couple of times already by the looks of it. The turtles look like they're on the way out though.

So your beef with the crocks is that it is not yet observational, even though it was just pointed out to you that it appears to be on the verge of becoming observational. Autobiogenesis doesn't appear to be the hangup, almost everyone agrees with that. So your point seems to be why bother, they're out there, but they aren't here. So pending arrival and contact you aren't willing to wait the decade or so for terrestrial analog verification? Don't you think that and the Mars fantasy will tie these people up long enough to sort out the problems?

My position is that the science of planetary astrophysics and astrobiology is so far ahead of Earth systems science that there really isn't any reason to study these problems anymore. It has become observational just like astronomy. It's now stamp collecting.

Have I mentioned my notion of an explanation for the "bubble" nature of the universe?http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr1/en/astro/structures/structures.asp

Walls of galaxies separated by large voids. I figure it's FTL. Someplace gets smart enough to figure out how to poke holes in the continuum as shortcuts, and they spend a while rushing back and forth across their locally reachable area and eventually enough holes have been poked that the whole local group tears itself loose and falls into its own navel.

I note that we haven't been watching much of the universe very long at all, and suggest that while we're looking for threatening asteroids, we ought to also be doing blink comparison studies of as much of the universe as we can see, and going back and pulling those glass plates from the old days, and looking for any evidence of galaxy-sized engineering happening.

In the late winter/early spring of 1995 I attended a Western Spectroscopy Association meeting where Prof. Zare was a featured speaker. (Coincidentally, I was just starting a project involving PAH spectroscopy.) He presented his 'martian microbe' work. Immediately upon his conclusion (ASU Prof.) Lucy Ziurys tore into him with a righteous fury the likes of which I had never observed before and have not encountered since. He didn't respond to speak of - as her criticisms weren't subject to debate. (Unfortunately, I don't recall the specifics, just that a rebuttal would have been straightforward if the data had supported it - it didn't.) That stated, Angular Momentum is a heck of book. I don't have any need to compute 9-j coefficients nowadays but I recall the text as clear and concise.

8c and ATTP, Eli has often said that the purpose of laboratory science is to restrain the imagination of astronomers and so with astrobiology.Indeed, but a lot of what people regard as astrobiology today, is lab based.

Of course, it's perfectly possible that alien probes are present in the solar system and even observing us. Wouldn't exactly take massive stealth technology for a probe sitting on a KBO to observe without being seen. And if you wanted to 'observe the galaxy' then such von neuman replicating probes would seem a pretty cheap way to do it.

But - from the examples we have - the actual origin of life, given suitable conditions (hot silicate rocks in contact with a suitable ocean, giving a hydrothermal system) seems 'easy' - it happened essentially instantly on earth.

Going from those bacteria to anything with a backbone.. perhaps 3 to 3.5 billion years.

Going from primitive amphibians to monkeys with technology only took c. 400 million years.

I very much suspect that the real Fermi Paradox issue is getting from microbes to macroscopic organisms. It's probably not an issue of speed of evolution, given the rate at which microbes evolve when they need to.

Which means that much of this 'discovered amino acids in meteorites' stuff is probably irrelevant to the question of life outside the solar system. The real question might be of environmental stability; such that an oxygen atmosphere, ocean, and land can all coexist in relative stability for millions of years. Which is probably very rare, at least until the exoplanet guys tell us otherwise..

One of the questions that arises in Astrobiology Research (and SETI) is what makes a livable planet. This can lead to discussions of the habitable zone and the effect of Greenhouse gases. We are apparently very close to the inner edge of the habitable zone and if enough greenhouse gases were added to the atmosphere, a runaway greenhouse effect would occur like what resulted in present day Venus.

Looking at the playbook for the Tobacco Industry, one of their tactics is to watch for and sabotage areas of research that could potentially cause them problems in the future. Astrobiology (and SETI) would be areas of research that would cause the Global Warming Deniers problems.

Years ago an attempt to organize an amateur SETI effort was very badly sabotaged by a hoax that was heavily aided by a BBC reporter. That reporter was Global Warming Denier David Whitehouse.

We aren't. See the link in the previous post. I think rather Eli's problem is with NASA's version of astrobiology, where it is generally considered that NASA's approach to a lot of things, including astrobiology, are not up to realistic citizen, taxpayer and participant expectations, and haven't been for many decades now.

Outside of NASA, everyone is an astrobiologist and acts like one. It is the insular nature and the funding and hiring practices of a federal scientific bureaucracy that is the basic problem here.

That recently changed in the DoD with a short meeting with some industrial scale astrobiology enthusiasts. It will change with NASA. By current events. Some yet to occur, but well predicted in advance.

I recall very well when a Martian meteorite, found in Antarctica, was alleged to contain signs of early life.A certain well known chemist was interviewed on the TeeVee by Ted Koppel, expressing his (the chemists) hope that the discovery would be confirmed by later work.

It wasn't. I was not surprised because the chemist in question had a reputation for rushing aggressively into print (and the TeeVee) to trumpet his new discovery (based on a "quick and dirty" experiment) without double checking.

At a meeting of chemists some months later, I heard comments like "I don't know anybody who believe it" and "down in flames"

This is how the scientific peer review process is supposed to work, filtering out dubious discoveries, even if the discoveries are performed in the lab of a distinguished scientist at a top university.

Hoo harsh , David- purely Newtonian Meteor Crater and larger-sized impacts are constantly whacking divots out of the greens in solar systems and into collisions with oadjacent planets and , on occasion , even out into interstellar space, - Hoyle had a point about life getting spread around by mere ballistics.

Read the appendix of 'The Logic of Chance' and all it is is a demonstration that if you choose a stupid model you get a stupid answer.

The most promising hypotheses revolve around hydrothermal vent systems - which gives us a series of reactions analogous to those happening in our cells, with increasing complexity. Nothing like a series of random combinations.

David, autobiogenesis, suitably redefined, is now accepted by the vast majority of the astrobiology community. It is demanded by both stochastic energetics and the uniqueness of the coulomb interaction.

String theory and the multiverse is rejected without evidence, because there is no evidence for it besides in condensed matter physics simulations and even that is a little iffy. What is indicated by the evidence is a coupling of gravitation to the other fundamental forces through geometric and topological mechanisms yet to be determined. This is the general scenario which has emerged since the discovery of the pnictide superconductors and the topological insulators in 2008.

SUST, string theory and the multiverse aren't dead, but they appear to be so far removed from the electroweak scale as to be inaccessible. This isn't about 'chance', it's about structure formation and self organization near quantum critical points. And if anything, our universe is one big quantum critical point, or it was. Now it's a lot of small ones, widely spaced. Merging them will be fun. Don't allow yourself to be sucked into the hype machine.

Fermi obviously had never played a game similar to Tortoise and Hares. In T&H the player has to muster his resources to go around a track while avoiding or interacting with the other players. One of the strategies is to avoid confrontations completely and just accumulate carrots which are the tokens spent to move forward. There is an incremental increase in carrots for every additional space around the track one wants to move. Moving around the track in one swell foop requires an enormous pile of carrots. There aren't enough carrots on Earth (or similar planet) to move to another planet. Much less conquer and/or terraform it. Spread across the galaxy? Ludicrous. There are costs that cannot be overcome. Climate change, resource depletion, atavistic loudmouths railing against civilization, etc. Physics is not conquest.

You've got it the wrong way around, Mr. Davis, you have said nothing using a lot of words. You need to express your denial clearly using as few words as possible. Around here, I get 'pshaw' from a lot of fundies.

Yes, I did read it. Assumes a RNA-world emerging by random combination of nucleotides, which is just plain daft, and then concludes that this can't have happened. He's also pushing a 'virus world' without any particular reason or evidence.

"Fermi realized that any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could rapidly [within ten million years] colonize the entire Galaxy."

I wonder what answer Fermi would have given himself if he had asked the question: "What's the likelihood of a civilisation having a sufficiently immodest amount of imperial incentive to last a 10-million-year colonisation?". If low enough, it would have a bearing on where everyone is.

I read Herschy et al., 2014. The comparison of bacteria with archaea was useful. That they could synthesize some formaldehyde was not at all surprising.

I note they referenced Koonin and Martin, 2005. This was an attempt at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesiswhich may have helped leadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kooninto writing the appendix to his book.

EV Koonin surely was aware of the hydrothermal vent hypothesis as Martin & Russel wrote about it in 2005 and that was surely not the first paper as I recall a lunch time conversation about the idea in the 1990s.

I'll have to have another look at Koonin's argument, but I doubt it is other than seriously motivated.

The Koonin threshold for the origin of life on Earth A 'review' of The Logic of Chanceby Gert Korthof Was Darwin Wrong blog 2013 Jan 03covers Koonin's origin argument quite nicely and also lists several other serious reviews of the book.

This is much clearer than Chapter 12 and Appendix B in The Logic of Chance.

Koonin is WIDELY seen as a crackpot in the world of astrobiology, that is by active participants in the field. Invoking the multiverse as the anthropic principle is equivalent to saying 'god did it'. That's not the way science works, sorry. Koonin is a complete dead end in this.

All the discussion of the evolution of life on Earth from a primordial soup if chemicals in the oceans thru germ cells to discrete life forms leading to us humans wandering around on dry land while contemplating a race to the colonization of the stars still leaves me wondering exactly how we made it this far. Given the influence of random chance, is our DNA based life form an expected result of some 4 Billion years of evolution, or are we unique? In other words, would other life forms have similarly evolved to a level of intelligence which we claim to be superior?

But, life has a way of slapping you upside the head every once and a while. The sad story of the murder of a British politician by a white supremacist reminds us of earlier thinking about racial superiority in the first half of the 20th century. It turns out that the perp was connected to a group in the US called the National Alliance. Reading their long winded web page sort of sounds like what I wrote about the Darwinian based rise of human intelligence, that is, until they go off track and start dividing people into racial divisions. Any bunny who is interested in the study of their mind set can read all about it HERE.

What I find really strange about this situation is that the connection between the perp and the NA was revealed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a US based organization which tracks exstremist groups. So, to me, it appears truly strange that this US organization just happened to "know" that the perp bought several books from the NA. Wait a minute, exactly how did they come up with that information? Not being a conspiracy nut, I leave it to the reader to construct his/her own theory as to how this was done. Even more interesting is the fact that the NA now uses an address about 30 miles from where I sit. I think I'm surrounded by like minded RedNeckastanians.

David, no one gets excited by the accidental formation and crystalization of most of the inorganic compounds that exist in in the form of minerals, including sheet silicates capable of reproducing latice defects that arise in their formation.

The challenges of climate modeling rival the difficulty of modeling the combinatorially and thermodynamically more complex case of reflux reactions among carbon compounds , nor our ignorance of the variety and speed of fluctuation of the reaction conditions that allow them to grow in number and molecular weight.

But that does not mean that this hard problem has only one solution- while some millions of human organic chemists have only been at work for a few billion man-years, teramoles of organic molecules have been interacting and undergoing catalysis for teraseconds in a terrestrial phase space of unknowable complexity .How the hell can anyone assert they know what this plenum of processes has not produced withing the thermal range of life as we thus far know it ?

I vivdy recall a mineralogist who, though he began each year's course in silicate phase equilibria by remarking :

"Rocas are just ceramics that happen to have been made by God," never let it stop him from discovering new ones.

Kim Stanley Robinson touches on all (or at least most) of the points that I and others here have made in dueling with TLE recently, and with others several years ago. And he also makes the same conclusion: there is no Planet B.

I wish you well, Barnard, living with 10 billion insane religious fascists on the surface of planet Earth, with Donald Trump, Mike Pence et al. in charge, and Stephan Miller as Joseph Goebbels with Steve Bannon as Martin Bormann. Living out my years in a space habitat and grow room seems like paradise to me. But you're right, there is no 'Plan B'. Your delusions will have to suffice.

TLE, whilst I vehemently agree with you on many things, I have yet to see any argument that satisfactorily addresses all the conditions that must be met for any interstellar ecosystem that could plausibly last for more than a portion of a human lifetime.

I have no enthusiasm for the prospect of a planet peopled by the sociopathic leaders of global business and government (nor by a population of 10-11 billion Western-style consumers), but I cannot see any extraterrestrial way that will relieve me and my fellow life forms of this challenge. And contrary to your assertion I'm under no delusions about what will happen with business as usual.

But if there's to be any salvage of the situation (even one that might not involve much continuation of humanity...), as far as the physical numbers indicate the answers must necessarily be Earth-bound. If you think otherwise I'd be happy - nay, ecstatic - to read your own counter essay that takes in turn each of KSR's points and provides a robustly defensible rebuttal of the issues discussed.

And note that you're talking about a complex ecosystem approach that requires continued integrity of an entire systems web in space and time. There are so may points of non-redundancy involved that even if semi-magical assumptions are made (such as perfect cryonic suspension, or near- or beyond-light-speed travel), the whole enterprise of interstellar (or even just extraplanetary) biospheric containment appears on all the evidence avaiable inevitably vulnerable to catastrophic entropic failure beyond a decade or so.

I think your definition of extraterrestrial differs greatly from mine.

You aren't thinking in terms of 'spacetime'. Ecosystems are malleable. They wax and wane and come and go. I can wait long enough for this one to go, and it won't be too long by the looks of it. The point is, nobody has realistically tried yet, not even on Earth. These kinds of systems evolve over time, they don't just spring into existence like many on this planet believe.

There's very much a clock on the human condition, and it's close to midnight. We have a limited budget of fossil joules to carry us to a non fossil-fueled future, and a limited amount of time in the pond before it becomes a fœtid cesspool.

Just tonight I was watching Brian Cox's discussion about life in the galaxy, and he commented on the oft-repeated idea of the many bottlenecks in the evolution from single-celled life to multicelled life to intelligence and techological capacity. Further to that is the bottleneck of exploiting fossilised energy to a post fossil-fuel civilisation, and there's a very definite narrowly constrained window there too. The Drake equation and the Fermi paradox together suggest that extraterrestrial technology is a profoundly tight bottleneck, and humanity's current path suggests that even if there is interstellar technological magic in an unconstrained future, we're not tracking remotely well to discover it before the wondow closes.

Of course ecosystems are plastic, and constaintly evolving. But they're also contrained, especially on short time-scales, and can fail. Something can spring in a failed ecosystem's place, and such will surely happen with the ecosystems that humans break, but there is little prospect that the new ones will be benevolent toward comfortable human extance, let alone to the luxury of human travel to the stars.

You understand I consider Brian Cox to be a scientific crank of the highest order right? Right up there with Kathryn Hayhoe and Sylvester James Gates. So that doesn't impress me at all. Also I have spent a lot of time in spares ecosystems. They do work, as long as the primary predator is a vegetarian. And your definition of failure is considerably more strict and absolute than mine. I'm a scientist.

TLE, it matters not what you think of Cox - my point was that he raised pertinent points and was reasonably referencing other scientists who have considered the numbers - and those numbers don't appear to have been refuted.

Ecocystems on Earth, even sparse ones, have the benefit of linkage to many systems and cycles that traverse large parts (if not all) of the planet. Even vegetarian humans floating in a tin can don't have the benefit of scale that harsh, difficult terrestrial ecosystems have. And there's an inherent resilience that comes from millions of years of coevolution and adaptations: a space environment completely negates the most of evolutionary refinements of the component species.

And you're not properly addressing many of the other points that Robinson makes in his essay. I've been doing science for decades too, both biomedical and ecological, and you're not explaining how the manifold weak threads in an extraterrestrial ecosystem web would be addressed.

For a certainty, given the fundamental lack of technological sophistication needed for extraterrestrial ecosystems, you won't see deep space beyond a possible gliding catenary, and nor will more than a handful of humans alive today. Any trip to Mars will be like Scott in the Antarctic, or Burke and Wills in the Australia outback, just writ large. And given the lack of human societal coherence and its decending trajectory, that pinhole of faint hope that we might manage something in the coming centuries beyond our own lifetimes is rapidly shrinking, even as we might imagine that it's not.

I understand your antipathy to magical thinking. I really do. But it applies as much to astroscience as it does to everything else, and all I see in the futurist narrative is a lot of wand waving and sparkles, but no rabbit.

You don't seem to have the faintest idea how these things work. Ecosystems in a can don't have to be perfect, they just have to be good enough to get a couple of people past an extinction level event. In fact they just need to be biological repositories as well. You can't hide a tomb from grave robbers on this planet. It's far easier and more efficient to do something like this in space, if you want to skip the next golden age of science and the huge mess that has created for us. You aren't going to be able to educate packs of wild dogs all over again. All one really needs to do is educate your children. Society and culture have failed miserably on this planet, it's better to start over fresh, from scratch. There is is very little corrosion or decay in space, if you store things properly. Like, for instance, information.

I don't even bother to try explaining these kinds of concepts to the likes of KSR and Cox. Befuddled is how I describe people like that.

You realize I used to work with some of the world's best ecologists right? In the field? While I was conducting my own ecological experiments? You realize I invented and commercialized hydroponic grow rooms way back in the 70's right? Do you somehow think I have zero experience in this domain? NASA? The debacle of Constellation, SLS and Orion? The agency who has not even flown a simple inner solar system asteroid detection mission despite being ordered by congress to do so decades ago? The institution of the NASA Astronot Hero Worship Cult?

The NASA of the NAHWC? The agency that put a science denying gigliolgist on the moon, who now is testifying before congress tomorrow? Surely you jest, Dr. Bernard. That is so weird how our unstable ecological system susceptible to the slightest perturbation is still here after four billion years? Your skepticism is very lame.

I dismiss you, but only because you present no evidence to support your skepticism. Get back to me when you have something substantive to say about the domain of science that I have created out of thin air. Thanks. I'm pretty busy with some of the other domains of science I have recently invented because they did not previously exist and there were some problems I was interested in solving.

One of which involved biological life support systems in closed spaces, something that has not been previously attempted outside of clandestine hydroponic grow room laboratories in Northern California.

I spent a couple of summers working with commercial hydroponics for one of my uncles, and they're high-intensity input systems that have a footprint and a reach far beyond their physical containment. Just about most agriculture falls into that category. I'm myself a passionate gardener, and even gardening - even gardening by the oldest and wisest of the hoary gaffers - is an exercise in ecosystem sustaining that extends far beyond the physical boundaries of the systems. Their footprint indices are greater than 1.0.

Consider a garden. Really consider... Leave it to the vagaries of nature and it will go to weeds, to decay, and to entropic homogenisation. The biodiversity of a productive garden requires the input of many resources beyond the fences of the garden itself, and even in the very best cases where careful recycling of on-site material is retained, there are inputs of human intelligence, labour, and culture that extend their tendrils far beyond the apparent boundaries of the system in question

The biodiversity of a productive garden is rarely, if ever, reproduced in nature on the same spatial scale - nature usually requires order(s) of magnitude greater to sustain what humans condense into small spaces, using their intelligence and their robbing of energy from other places. Gardens are high generators of entropy. Even in the highly diverse natural ecosystems such as tropical reeefs and rainforests there is a huge input from beyond the physcial bounds of the respective ecosystems, so the actual supporting footprint is immeasureably greater than many appreciate.

And you think that you can squeeze into a floating tin can the ecological diversity required to sustain indefinitely the functions and sundry biological intregrities required to keep humans - an extremely high apex predator - sustained in space over generations? Especially anything vaguely resembling the biosphere as it currently exists on Earth? And on top of everything else this includes a sustained advanced culture robust to degradation or corruption?

But you claim that you can do it. Fine. Pick the largest warehouse that you can find. Give it a glass roof. Seal it from any input of gas, water, nutrient or flux of energy from the outside, beyond incident solar radiation (you can seal in any one-off power source that you choose). Populate it with your ecosystem components.

And show us how it works.

(And note, a terrestrial demonstration relieves you of the burden of weightlessness, to which lide is not adapted, and it relieves you of the burden of insulation from space temperatures...)

That "showing" should include a list of the autotrophs and the heterotrophs that you've selected. Not only a list of the species, but a modelling of how they will interact with each other. After all, you can't build an independently functioning ecosystem if you can't explain how it works. A full break-down of the trophic allocations, the energy budgets, the dynamic resource partitioning.

There will , naturally, be redundancies.

Of course, it's not just a matter of lettuce feeds bunny feeds TLE, because a proper sustiabable ecosystem that is robust to the selection of evolutionary whims will necesarily have an inherent biological/ecological tension. There will be competitors, and symbionts, and pests and predators and diseases. I mention diseases: there will not just be microbioligical entities that provide feedback in the way that diseases do as we understand it, but there will be microbes that are commensal or indirectly beneficial, that are essential in the sustenance of an ongoing functional ecosystem, but that represent the challenge of potential evolution to malevolence. Indeed, many of the other components, even putative food species, may evolve beyond their niches in your ant farm: Nature abhors a vacuum, and no matter what you say an isolated, artificial ecosystem with have spaces, monocultures and other blank canvasses just waiting for evolution to scrawl its graffiti.

You say that you can do this. Show us your working. Even if it's (gag) commerical-in-confidence you should be able to give a very detailed broad-brush listing, because there is so much more to constructing a viable ecosystem than simply indicating the conmonent parts. Even listing just half of the components would render the replication of the rest of the system impossible without stupendous trial and error.

I'm calling bullshit.

From Leyden jars to gardens to farms to rehabilitated islands, humans have singluarly failed under their own recognisance to build a successful continually-functioning ecosystem from the ground up. David Suzuki is absolutely right when he says that its a conceit and an arrogance that humans imagine that they can 'manage' entire ecosystems. Where we've made something that works its always because nature waltzes in despite our planning, not because of it. It always involves the input of resources beyond those that humans control through their own agency.

You've made a lot of claims about being about to cut the terrestrial umbilicus, but there's absolutely not a skerrick of defensible evidence that indicates that you can. I say that you can't, and won't, ever launch a successful sustaining extraterrestrial ecosystem that carries anything resembling even a basic Earthly ecosystem. No one ever will.

You'll just have to excuse me for not reading your long rants, I know you put a lot of effort into it, maybe somebody else will read it.

Nobody has seriously tried to put together a semi closed system. It's really not that hard. And the point isn't generation ships to the stars, that's yours, KSR's and PZ's insane delusions. The point is to keep people alive for longer and longer periods of time until semi stable sustainable systems are evolved into being, as all things are.

I live in southern Wisconsin. You've probably heard it, I call it Parasistan nowadays. I am familiar how decidously leaves from deciduous trees drives ecosystem diversity and stability around here. In fact, I've even written up how these things work around here.

Over and over again. I'm pretty sure I'll get around to testing it again sometime, now that people are actually interested in trying it.

As I have. These are short term survival techniques to be used for ever longer and longer runs, until either winter ends or the smoke blows over. Your conception of what this all about even fails at the most fundamental level. You are both misguided and uniformed.

That's it?! Two pages of foil-hat waffle that could be knocked together in 15 minutes by a 6th grader?

Snork.

You have nothing TLE. I doubt that you could even do anything as simple* as survive for a month only on what you can grow in a suburban back yard. But if I'm "misguided and uninformed" you can easily prove me wrong - put together a vlog showing exactly how you can survive for a month in the best exemplar of one of your human-sustaining ecosystem. For a just a month. You can do it over summer if you like, and you can even go out and buy the seeds and stock before you start. But do document each of your meals in picture form, and their origin in the system that you've created. With time stamps, so that we know that you're speaking sincerely.

[*Even a month doing that is not so "simple" if one removes any and all of the acoutrements of extra-system input...]

TLE, I'm absolutely with you on designing systems that allow people to survive under their own steam, rather than being reliant on industrial food production. I'm involved in my own local community's vibrant group to produce 'organic' food and to build with vernacular materials. It's rewarding and it's heading in the right direction, but it's difficult enough even when such systems are interfacing with what remains of the 'natural' environment, and garnering the benefit of the spill-over of productivity from natural ecosystem functions.

I also spent some of my teenage years 'rehabilitating' old mine sites. That's a story in and of itself, but the crux is that any paltry successes that we had were mere shadows of the ecology that existed prior. Nature itself takes time to rebuild its complexity when such is damaged (but not removed), even when it is replete with the seeds and other nuclei of regeneration.

But none of this is 'building' independently-sustainable ecosystems. Humans have been trying this for decades, and there's nothing yet to which we can point and say "job well done". And we're not going to see the letters TLE in that domain any time soon - or later...

No, they haven't. I personally have been working through a lot of the preliminary foundations for decades, and then taking that knowledge into the field and testing it. Nobody else has even tried. Biosphere 2 doesn't count, that was fraudulent from the get go, and serious workers in the field knew that from the beginning. You demands that a working system just appear out of nowhere reveals your ignorance of how science and technology works, sorry. That is why I dismiss your thoughts on this. That and all the other interesting tangential distractions as a result of my previous work in the field of quantum astrophysics, as I know describe it. I'm just waiting for the billionaires to catch up. I'm just discerning of billionaires. Back then, Ed Bass didn't make the grade with me. There were plenty of other scientists (ecologists) willing to prostitute themselves to Ed Bass for money, fame and profit. And I'm not talking about Steve Bannon. I'm at the point now where I know how this needs to proceed.

Kim Stanley Robinson touches on all (or at least most) of the points that I and others here have made in dueling with TLE recently, and with others several years ago. And he also makes the same conclusion: there is no Planet B.

Some time back, I suggested to TLE that he read KSR's recent novel Aurora for entertainment and enlightenment. This is why. I doubt he noted the suggestion though.

Suuuuuure. There is no moon right there, Lagrange points, resonant asteroids, plus, a great big planet with lots of religious nuts just anxious to 1) evolve and 2) survive. Therefore the habitats and their integrated inhabitants can ... get this ... evolve.

It's the amorphization of the metal salt polymer that I am interested in. Maybe that might be enough to distract me from axions. The CELSS is very old science for me. It will require innovative gas and ion sensors to make it work. Hence my preliminary work in the field of 'atomenes'.

One thing leads to another with me, BBD, but I do have a plan. It may not be my plan to execute, but now it's out there for somebody to try.

Unfortunately, nobody is busting my door down for my thoughts on this. Therefore it's not my problem, it's yours. I already did my part. I was just anxious to get it over with before Trump took office.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.